Field of Invention
Various embodiments of the present invention relate to an avionics application system where aviation software development technologies are integrated with methods for monitoring online distributed processing, and more particularly to a health monitoring apparatus and method in an aeronautic system.
Description of Related Art
Avionics is a compound word of aviation and electronics, referring to components and fine systems mounted on airplanes that are operated by electronic technologies. Therefore, an avionics system consists of various electronic apparatuses in order to perform various types of tasks.
As the number of electronic apparatuses embedded in an avionics system continues to increase due to the increasing number of tasks, integrated modular avionics systems where electronic apparatuses are integrated into one system are used instead of federated avionics systems where electronic apparatuses are configured independently.
An integrated modular avionics system integrates the electronic apparatuses of a conventional federated avionics system into one computer equipment, and thus has an advantage of reducing the size, weight, and power consumption of the computer equipment.
However, in order to configure such an integrated modular avionics system, there needs to be a standard for guaranteeing a real time operating system and the independency of application programs.
ARINC 653 is a specification for aviation software development, and an API standard for a real-time operating system required in an integrated modular avionics system. That is, ARINC 653 defines an application interface between a real-time operating system and application programs operating on the real-time operating system.
Therefore, with aviation software developed based on the aforementioned API standard, it is possible to reduce the dependency on development hardware, extend the portability to other systems, and improve simultaneous application development capabilities.
Furthermore, ARINC 653 can provide various services such as a partition management, process management, time management, memory allocation, interpartition communication, intrapartition communication and health monitor.
Especially, the health monitor is a function of an OS (operating system) that monitors errors of hardware, application, and OS (operating system) and reports the errors to a CPU. It may also prevent errors occurred in one system from affecting another system.
However, in a conventional aeronautic system, the health monitor exists inside the ARINC 653 system, and thus when a problem occurs in the ARINC 653 system, the health monitor cannot operate normally, thereby deteriorating the reliability of the aeronautic system.
Furthermore, in such a conventional aeronautic system, each of the monitors and an apparatus for determining error levels included in the health monitor exist in an independent and layered structure, thereby decreasing the stability of the aeronautic system and increasing the development costs of the aeronautic system.